Occupied Paris cafés displayed disappearances through emptied familiar seats

Evidence

It was as if the sidewalks of the city opened occasionally, he wrote, and a tentacled monster reached up to drag someone down. The cafés, always filled with familiar faces, also became an index to disappearances. Beauvoir wrote of how two attractive Czech women, regulars at the Café Flore, were suddenly not there one day. They never came back. It was unbearable to see their empty places: ‘it was, precisely, a nothingness’. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 476

Categorization

• DEFINE: Beauvoir’s ‘it was, precisely, a nothingness’ gives a concrete, lived instance of the nothingness concept central to existentialism — absence felt in a specific vanished person, not abstract negation.
• XREF: The empty café seat evokes the reader’s interest in how vacancy and absence carry meaning — parallels with silence as positively present rather than mere absence in the soundscape books.